The White House has still not released the Congressional report detailing the CIA’s use of torture as an interrogation technique. While a full report exists and was written by the Senate specifically with the intent of it being made public, the Obama administration is hoping to instead release a redacted version approved by the CIA with key details missing, according to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Some who have long opposed the spy agency’s practices feel the report should be made public regardless of an almost certain negative domestic and international backlash, as former Rep. Ron Paul explains to RT’s Ameera David.

The US government’s decision to apply more sanctions on Russia is a grave mistake and will only escalate an already tense situation, ultimately harming the US economy itself. While the effect of sanctions on the dollar may not be appreciated in the short term, in the long run these sanctions are just another step toward the dollar’s eventual demise as the world’s reserve currency. Continue reading »

President Obama announced last week that he was imposing yet another round of sanctions on Russia, this time targeting financial, arms, and energy sectors. The European Union, as it has done each time, quickly followed suit.

These sanctions will not produce the results Washington demands, but they will hurt the economies of the US and EU, as well as Russia. Continue reading »

Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, “we don’t torture people”? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, “this government does not torture people”? We knew then it was not true because we had already seen the photos of Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib prison four years earlier.

Still the US administration denied that torture was torture, preferring to call it “enhanced interrogation” and claiming that it had disrupted so many terrorist plots. Of course, we later found out that the CIA had not only lied about the torture of large numbers of people after 9/11, but it had vastly exaggerated any valuable information that came from such practices.

Ron Paul, the former U.S. representative from Texas and perhaps America’s most popular libertarian voice, has long said that the nation’s monetary and fiscal policies would result in massive inflation. According to the common measures of inflation, this has not yet occurred. But Paul maintains that the inflation he has warned of has indeed come to fruition in asset prices, and that once it unravels, a market crash will ensue. Continue reading »

Elementary pacing examples from Obama include, “now is the time”, and “as I stand here before you.”

These statements are undeniably true in the simplest terms and commonly used parts of his pacing techniques, because of course now is the time, and if he is there speaking, of course he is standing before us.

These are things the hypnotist says that are verifiably true, and used to lower our critical factor defenses to allow implantation of subconscious messages.

The United States is being hypocritical in its response to the armed clashes between Kiev and pro-Russian groups in eastern Ukraine, former Congressman Ron Paul wrote in a new column.

In the column, published by the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, the former libertarian lawmaker questioned the American role in the conflict unfolding in Ukraine, criticizing the US for blaming recent outbreaks of violence on Russian sympathizers rather than the Ukrainian military.Continue reading »

The nation’s attention has for the past few weeks been riveted by a standoff in Nevada between armed federal agents and the Bundys, a ranching family who believe the federal government is exceeding its authority by accessing “fees” against ranchers who graze cattle on government lands. Outrage over the government’s use of armed agents to forcibly remove the Bundys’ cattle led many Americans to travel to Nevada to engage in non-violent civil disobedience in support of the family.

The protests seem to have worked, at least for now, as the government appears to have backed off from direct confrontation. Sadly, some elected officials have inflamed the situation by labeling the Bundys and their supporters “domestic terrorists,” thus justifying any future use of force by the government. That means there is always the possibility of another deadly Waco-style raid on the Bundys or a similar group in the future. Continue reading »

A heated land dispute between the federal government and a Nevada cattle rancher subsided over the weekend, but longtime lawmaker and former presidential hopeful Ron Paul says tensions might soon worsen once again.

An armed standoff between Cliven Bundy and the United States Bureau of Land Management ended on Saturday with the federal agency agreeing to release around 400 head of cattle it had seized from the Clark County, Nevada rancher. The bureau said Bundy owed roughly $1 million to the government because for the last two decades he failed to pay a fee for letting his cattle graze on federal land, but the rancher insisted that he owed the agency nothing. Supporters soon took up arms and flocked to the Bunch ranch to stand by in support as feds began to seize nearly 1,000 head of cattle, but over the weekend the BLM aborted their attempt to confiscate the animals in order avoid any violent showdown that might have emerged. Continue reading »

“I think it was wrong for us to get involved and participate in the overthrow of the government,” exclaims Ron Paul in this brief clip, adding the US is “stirring up trouble in Crimea.” The American people are “tired of it,” and “it would be best for us to stay out.” The US doesn’t need another war – and certainly can’t afford it – and “we don’t want trade wars.” Simply put, he concludes, “it’s best we stay out.”

Former US congressman Ron Paul has defended Russian President Vladimir Putin over the upcoming referendum in Ukraine’s autonomous region of Crimea.

Following the current crisis in Ukraine, people in Crimea will vote on Sunday on whether they want to be part of Ukraine or Russia.

In an interview with Fox News, Paul said Washington and its Western allies participated in the overthrow of the government of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich.

“This whole thing that Putin is the big cause of the trouble and yet there’s pretty good evidence that the Europeans as well as the American government had to contrive to have the overthrow of a government that most people say had been elected,” Paul said.

Officially, US debt stands at more than $17 trillion. In reality, it is many times more. The cost of the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq may be more than six trillion dollars. President Obama’s illegal invasion of Libya cost at least a billion dollars and left that country devastated. The costs of US regime change efforts in Syria are likely thus far enormous, both in dollars and lives. That’s still a secret.

So who in his right mind would think it is a good time to start a war with Russia over Ukraine? And worse, who would commit the United States to bail out a Ukraine that will need at least $35 billion to survive the year?

Who? The president and Congress, backed by the neocons and the so-called humanitarian interventionists!

Former Congressman Ron Paul has launched a petition to attempt to garner clemency for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The “Demand Clemency for Edward Snowden” petition includes the clip below, Paul calls on supporters to sign the petition in an attempt to bring Snowden home to the US safely before his temporary visa in Russia expires in July.

On the heels of his son Rand Paul’s lawsuit against the Obama nd the NSA seeking to stop its collection of phone metadata, Ron Paul states “Edward Snowden shocked the world when he exposed the NSA’s illegal and abusive spying program. Instead of applauding him for his bravery and patriotism, the U.S. government labels Snowden a traitor.”

President Obama’s state of the union pledge to “act with or without Congress” marks a milestone in presidential usurpation of Congressional authority. Most modern presidents have used executive orders to change and even create laws without Congressional approval. However President Obama is unusually brazen, in that most Presidents do not brag about their plans to rule by executive order in state of the union speeches.

Sadly, his pledge to use his pen to implement laws and polices without the consent of Congress not only received thunderous applause from representatives of the president’s party, some representatives have even pledged to help Obama get around Congress by providing him with ideas for executive orders. The Constitution’s authors would be horrified to see legislators actively aiding and abetting a president taking power away from the legislature.

Supporters of warfare, welfare, and Wonder Woman cheered last week as Congress passed a one trillion dollar “omnibus” appropriation bill. This legislation funds the operations of government for the remainder of the fiscal year. Wonder Woman fans can cheer that buried in the bill was a $10,000 grant for a theater program to explore the comic book heroine.

That is just one of the many outrageous projects buried in this 1,582-page bill. The legislation gives the Department of Education more money to continue nationalizing education via “common core.” Also, despite new evidence of Obamacare’s failure emerging on an almost daily basis, the Omnibus bill does nothing to roll back this disastrous law. Continue reading »

The concept of the business cycle and its un-natural intervention-inspired boom-bust process is at the core of the following three minutes of dueling quotes from two of the most infamous public proponents of change (Ron Paul) and the status quo (Paul Krugman).

“Cut interest rates a couple of percentage points, provide plenty of liquidity, and call me in the morning.” – Krugman

“Printing money is not an answer… Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom… cannot last forever.” – Paul

One of the least discussed, but potentially most significant, provisions in President Obama’s budget is the use of the “chained consumer price index” (chained CPI), to measure the effect of inflation on people’s standard of living. Chained CPI is an effort to alter the perceived impact of inflation via the gimmick of “full substitution.” This is the assumption that when the price of one consumer product increases, consumers will simply substitute a similar, lower-cost product with no adverse effect. Thus, the government decides your standard of living is not affected if you can no longer afford to eat steak, as long as you can afford to eat hamburger. Continue reading »

In a little-known 2006 speech (in the US, though widely known around the world), entitled “The End of Dollar Hegemony,” Ron Paul discusses the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system – which most people know about – and the de-facto system that replaced it – which most people do not know about. As Casey Research’s Nick Giambruno notes it is a must listen with the most important part of the speech where Paul discusses the petrodollar system, a primary factor in maintaining the dollar’s role as the world’s premier currency after the breakdown of Bretton Woods.

The most important part of the speech is where Paul discusses the petrodollar system, a primary factor in maintaining the dollar’s role as the world’s premier currency after the breakdown of Bretton Woods.

“It all ended on August 15, 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window and refused to pay out any of our remaining 280 million ounces of gold. In essence, we declared our insolvency and everyone recognized some other monetary system had to be devised in order to bring stability to the markets.

Amazingly, a new system was devised which allowed the US to operate the printing presses for the world reserve currency with no restraints placed on it—not even a pretense of gold convertibility, none whatsoever! Though the new policy was even more deeply flawed, it nevertheless opened the door for dollar hegemony to spread. Continue reading »

“The American people are being bamboozled into believing that you have to keep spending for ever,” Ron Paul exclaims, as “neither side is truly looking for spending cuts.” As he explains they all know that increasing spending is all that can maintain the status quo. In this brief CNBC clip, Paul says playing the blame game is ignorant of the reality that both sides are “rigid with bad ideas,” dismissing Obama’s ‘faction’ comments. For a glimpse at the chaos underlying the status quo (that is being exposed this week), Paul blasts that “it is a philosophy of government that is to blame; Keynesianism, Militarism, and Interventionism, and the funny-money system that we use. All that has come together and the country is bankrupt and nobody wants to amid it.”

“Why in the world can’t the people have an option to opt-out?” is the middle ground possibility that Paul suggests…

“While more are waking up to it (especially in light of the non-essential services furloughs currently), there is still an appetite for big government – people are afraid to give up on it.”

The Democrats are just as “rigid” as the Republicans.. “They are rigid with bad ideas too in that “deficits don’t matter, the government has to spend, and the government has to take care of us, and you should print money when you need it.”

Paul goes on to discuss Gold “all central banks work together – they collude”

… Moral convictions, “right or wrong”, and “the only thing that really counts is what the American people believe the role of government should be… and if deficits don’t matter, it will not be a shutdown of government but a breakdown of government that occurs“

If Barack Obama is going to attack Syria, he is going to do it without the support of the American people, without the approval of Congress, without the approval of the United Nations, and without the help of the British. Now that the British Parliament has voted against a military strike, the Obama administration is saying that it may take “unilateral action” against Syria. But what good would “a shot across Syria’s bow” actually do? A “limited strike” is not going to bring down the Assad regime and it is certainly not going to end the bloody civil war that has been raging inside Syria. Even if the U.S. eventually removed Assad, the al-Qaeda affiliated rebels that would take power would almost certainly be even worse than Assad. Even in the midst of this bloody civil war, the rebels have taken the time and the effort to massacre entire Christian villages. Why is Barack Obama so obsessed with helping such monsters? There is no good outcome in Syria. The Assad regime is absolutely horrible and the rebels are even worse. Why would we want the U.S. military to get involved in such a mess?

The AP reports that US intelligence officials are admitting that linking Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle to an alleged chemical weapons attack is no “slam dunk,” as opposed to Obama (and Kerry) who are ‘unequivocal’ of the fact.

The intelligence linking Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle to an alleged chemical weapons attack is no “slam dunk,” with questions remaining about who actually controls some of Syria’s chemical weapons stores and doubts about whether Assad himself ordered the strike, U.S. intelligence officials say.

…

an intercept of Syrian military officials discussing the strike was among low-level staff, with no direct evidence tying the attack back to an Assad insider or even a senior Syrian commander, the officials said.

So while Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that links between the attack and the Assad government are “undeniable,” U.S. intelligence officials are not so certain that the suspected chemical attack was carried out on Assad’s orders, or even completely sure it was carried out by government forces, the officials said.

Former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) is being billed as the keynote speaker at a September conference sponsored by the Fatima Center, which one civil rights organization calls “the single largest group of hard-core anti-Semites in North America.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog noted on Tuesday that Paul had reportedly accepted the speaking engagement at the Fatima Center’s September “Fatima: The Path to Peace” conference in Canada.

“All speakers share one thing in common: a keen understanding that the nations of the world suffer profound disorder, that evil and shocking immorality are on the rise, that war and violence steadily increase, that the stability of our entire social order is at stake, and that a solution to the present chaos is of utmost necessity,” a statement from the Fatima Center said.

In 2001, the Patriot Act opened the door to US government monitoring of Americans without a warrant. It was unconstitutional, but most in Congress over my strong objection were so determined to do something after the attacks of 9/11 that they did not seem to give it too much thought. Civil liberties groups were concerned, and some of us in Congress warned about giving up our liberties even in the post-9/11 panic. But at the time most Americans did not seem too worried about the intrusion.

This complacency has suddenly shifted given recent revelations of the extent of government spying on Americans. Politicians and bureaucrats are faced with serious backlash from Americans outraged that their most personal communications are intercepted and stored. They had been told that only the terrorists would be monitored. In response to this anger, defenders of the program have time and again resorted to spreading lies and distortions. But these untruths are now being exposed very quickly.